PicoNtrol Brings Modern Controllers To Atari 2600

April 13, 2024 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

While there’s an argument to be made that retro games should be experienced with whatever input device they were designed around, there’s no debating that modern game controllers are a lot more ergonomic and enjoyable to use than some of those early 8-bit entries.

Now, thanks to the PicoNtrol project from [Reogen], you can use the latest Xbox and PlayStation controllers with the Atari 2600 via Bluetooth. Looking a bit farther down the road the project is aiming to support the Nintendo Entertainment System, and there’s work being done to bring the Switch Pro Controller into the fold as well.

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Toy Gaming Controller Makes The Big Leagues

November 1, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 5 Comments

Some of the off-brand video game consoles and even accessories for the major brands can leave a lot to be desired. Whether it’s poor build quality or a general lack of support or updates, there are quite a few things on the market not worth anyone’s time or money. [Jonathan] was recently handed just such a peripheral, a toy game controller originally meant for a small child, but upon further inspection it turned into a surprisingly hackable platform, capable of plenty of IoT-type tasks.

The controller itself was easily disassembled, and the functional buttons within were wired to a Wemos D1 Mini instead of the originally-planned ESP32 because of some wiring irregularities and the fact that the Wemos D1 Mini having the required amount of I/O. It’s still small enough to be sealed back inside the controller as well, powered by the batteries that would have powered the original controller.

For the software, [Jonathan] is using MQTT to register button presses with everything easily accessible over Wi-Fi, also making it possible to update the software wirelessly. He was able to use it to do a few things as proof-of-concept, including playing a game in PyGame and controlling a Sonos speaker, but for now he’s using it to control an LED sculpture. With something this easily modified, though, it would be pretty straightforward to use it instead for a home automation remote control, especially since it is already set up to use MQTT.

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A Controller For More Than Thumbs

July 7, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 4 Comments

As virtual reality continues to make headway into the modern zeitgeist, it is still lacking in a few key ways. There’s not yet an accepted standard for correlating body motion to movement within a game, with most of the mainstream VR offerings sidestepping this problem by requiring the user to operate some sort of handheld controller to navigate the virtual world. And besides a brief Kinect fad from the 2010s, there hasn’t been too much innovation in this area. But computers have continued to increase in capabilities and algorithms for tracking movement have improved, so [Fletcher Heisler] aka [Everything Is Hacked] leveraged these modern tools into a full-body controller configurable for any video game.

This project builds heavily on a previous project by [Fletcher] which took body position information and turned it into keyboard input, leveraging OpenCV and posture detection software to map keys to specific body positions. It only needed slight modification to work for gaming with regards to the ability to hold down keys or mash buttons, but essentially works by mapping certain keystrokes from the previous project to commands in games. In addition to that step he also added support for multiplayer by splitting the image captured by the camera into two halves so it can keep track of two people simultaneously.

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A Nintendo 64 controller with a USB adapter

Play N64 Games The Right Way With This Classic Controller Adapter

June 10, 2023 by Robin Kearey 11 Comments

Game consoles typically support a limited number of input devices, meaning that console games are often completely optimized for the default controller supplied with that platform. Nintendo’s tendency to completely reinvent their controllers pretty much every generation can therefore become a little irritating, especially when they also enable their newer consoles to play games from their back catalog. So when [Robson Couto] found that using the Switch’s Joy-Cons was a bit awkward for playing emulated Nintendo 64 games, he decided to figure out how to connect real N64 controllers to a Nintendo Switch.

While you can buy modern N64-style controllers for the Switch, even straight from Nintendo themselves, [Robson] thought it would be way more interesting to reuse an old controller and implement the translation step from scratch. In the video (embedded below) he takes a deep dive into all the timing details of the N64 controller protocol, which is basically a 1-wire setup, and explains how to use an STM32F411 BlackPill board to read out the controller’s buttons and joystick.

Next, he explores how to map the resulting data to the USB HID protocol used by the Switch. Most of the buttons have a clear one-on-one mapping, but since the “minus”, “capture” and “home” buttons are missing on the N64 controller, he chose to map these to button combinations unlikely to be used during regular gameplay. [Robson] also ran into the common issue of the analog joystick having a poorly-defined maximum range, for which he added a rudimentary auto-calibration feature.

Finally, he designed and 3D-printed a neat enclosure for his system with an N64 controller port on one side and a USB port on the other. By 3D-printing the whole thing he also avoided having to either source the non-standard connector or permanently modify his hardware. The end result of [Robson]’s project is an unobtrusive gadget that connects classic controllers to modern hardware – but of course, the reverse process is very much possible, too. If you want, you can even play N64 games with a mouse and keyboard.

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Autopsy Of A Drifting Thumbstick Reveals All

April 12, 2023 by Lewin Day 34 Comments

Analog sticks have become a core part of modern video game controllers. They also routinely fail or end up drifting, consigning expensive controllers to the garbage. [sjm4306] recently did a repair job on an Oculus VR gaming controller with drifting analog sticks, and decided to do an autopsy to figure out what actually went wrong.

A microscope reveals gouges in the resistive material, caused by the metal contacts inside the analog stick. This happened via regular use.

The video starts by taking apart the analog joystick itself by prying off the metal case. Inside, we get a look at the many tiny individual components that make up a modern thumbstick. Of most interest, though, are the components that make up the potentiometers within the stick. Investigation revealed that the metal contacts that move with the stick had worn through the resistive coating on the thin plastic membrane in the base of the joystick, creating the frustrating drift problem.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Analog sticks in modern controllers could be manufactured with higher-quality components that don’t wear so easily. After all, it’s hard to imagine a 90s video game controller wearing out as fast as this modern Oculus unit. But everything is built to a price, at the end of the day, and that’s just how it goes. Video after the break.

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Stadia Controller’s Two Extra Buttons Get Seen With WebHID

February 13, 2023 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

The Google Stadia game streaming service relied on a proprietary controller. It was a pretty neat piece of hardware that unfortunately looked destined for landfills when Google announced that Stadia would discontinue. Thankfully it’s possible to use them as normal gamepads, and related to that, [Thomas Steiner] has a developer blog post about how to talk to the Stadia controller via WebHID. Continue reading “Stadia Controller’s Two Extra Buttons Get Seen With WebHID” →

An exercise bike modified to become a game controller

Pedal Your Way Through Games With This USB Exercise Bike

December 26, 2022 by Robin Kearey 12 Comments

If you’re into cycling, there’s nothing better than heading out on the open road and feeling the wind in your hair. Unfortunately, climatic conditions make this uncomfortable or impossible at certain times of year, so you might be tempted to stay inside and play video games instead. Luckily, you can now get your gaming fix and still get in shape thanks to [Patrick]’s exercise bike game controller.

[Patrick] got himself a second-hand exercise bike and discovered that the speed sensor inside it was based on a magnet and reed relay, just like a regular bike computer. Reading out the sensor was therefore as simple as counting pulses using an Arduino Leonardo, and the USB HID protocol made it easy to turn the cycling mechanism into a one-dimensional game controller.

He then completed the setup by adding two 3D-printed handlebar-mounted gamepads with a few buttons and a thumbstick on each side. The total system now works as an ordinary gamepad, but with the option of using the bike as a forward/backward control.

We can imagine that this system will stay interesting for far longer than any off-the-shelf internet-connected exercise bike, because you can interface it with basically any game. [Patrick] demos his rig using first-person shooters like Doom and Team Fortress 2, but the possibilities are endless: how about turning FIFA games into bike polo? Or Mirror’s Edge into a bicycle courier adventure? After all, we’ve already seen how a similar game controller can turn Grand Theft Auto into something more like Grand Theft Bicycle.

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